Cramming for Contest

[Hanakon]

Last year I went to Skills Canada for website design in Waterloo, and I got in again this year, but the preliminaries don't test PHP. I've been doing website design here and there for awhile, but I never got very far into PHP. Last year I crammed for two weeks on how to get a basic PHP discussion forum going (part of the design skills tested) and managed to make it work at the event. Didn't win, but placed well. Anyhow, I kinda slacked off on PHP since, and now I'm back in the exact same position. 😛

So I have two weeks to re-learn how to whip up a PHP-driven basic forum on an XHTML 1.0 Transitional W3C compliant site. I'll have PHPmyAdmin to make the databases necessary (kinda sorta remember how that worked) and a hosting environment that's PHP-friendly. From what I recall, I need separate pages to take requests to add, change, or delete comments, and I need to have the site displaying the comments made dynamic, producing content fetched from the database. And of the course the forum needs to have a commend incorporated to send the submitted information to the database under a new entry.

One other thing: last year, they requested an email newsletter be included. Somebody submits their name and email, and a resulting message is sent to their inbox with their name thanking them for signing up, while their contact info is stored in the database. I wasn't able to pull this one off last year, having not practiced database-driven email. Also, there was a database with existing information provided for it, and the fields were filled with 1's and 0's only, which I didn't know what to do with.

At any rate, if anyone should have the spare time and interest, I'm asking for assistance in an efficient, easy to remember way to get these PHP/MySQL functions running with PHPmyAdmin. Passwords, security, logins, etc. are not necessary. What's most important is that I be able to memorize all of the coding, as we can't have any sort of prompts within the competition. All memory.

In case it's any help, the scope for the competition can be found here: http://www.skillsontario.com/images/pdf/scopes/web_site_development_scope_2009_sec_and_ps_fr

As it happens, I also need to brush up on my CSS, and play around with Dreamweaver CS3 (been using MX2004 forever). This I can handle on my own, but it's much harder to self-teach PHP, especially when most of the existing internet resources are excessively complex or contradictory. Again, I don't need die arguments, failure messages, posting rules, corrections, security, or anything aside from just the basic read, write, and delete entry functionalities.

Please don't mistake this as me seriously expecting everyone here getting together and helping me out; I realize it's a lengthy and bothersome request, largely at my own fault for not keeping up with my coding from last year. That said, much thanks to anyone who does offer to help; if this gets me anywhere, then I'll keep you guys up to date on how the contest goes on May 4th. 😛

[jeffrydell]

I'll help "a little bit". The field with 1's and 0's was probably a boolean of some sort - maybe (and this is a TOTAL guess) a True / False as to whether the users were subscribed or unsubscribed ... or possibly verified or unverified (click on the link in your first e-mail to verify for double opt-in).

As for mailing, it's a little more complicated if you are dealing with a database than if you accepting a form and just mailing from that ... only because you have to first query the db and get the user's name / email addy from the result set. Otherwise, it can all be done with the php mail() function.

Typically it would be done like this:

... code to collect up your recipient info...

$subject = "This is the subject line of your test message.";
$message = "This is the message body of your test message.";
$from = "[e-mail]";

if (mail($to, $subject, $message, $from))
{
   echo "Your mail was sent successfully. <br />";
}
else
{
  echo "There was a problem sending an e-mail to this recipient: " . $to . "<br />";
}

... either continue on with your form processing or repeat the loop if mailing to a list from the db table...

I hope this isn't too basic and that it helps you in your competition.

Good luck!